Dave.

Does it download the actual music tracks from youtube-music, or does YouTube helpfully provide the video version of the music?

I’ve used a few downloaders and it seems these days that every music video is a whole “production” with 30 seconds of dialogue and intro before the actual music starts, or there’s background noise over the first dozen bars (because the artist is in a cafe or car park or on the train in the clip) and all of that is just a bit tedious when listening to the audio only.

Effective advertising has a clear and simple visual language, and this is what UIs should strive for.

Interfaces can be needlessly complex regardless of being flat or skeuomorphic.

But flat interfaces still require mental effort to parse. Especially when the interface is complex and/or crowded and you’re trying to pick out active UI elements amongst decorations like group boxes/panels.

Essentially, flat interfaces are currently popular because of touchscreen devices. Touchscreen devices have limited space and thus need simplistic UI elements that can be prodded by a fat finger on a small screen.

But I don’t need a flat touchscreen-friendly interface on my non-touch dual 24" monitors with acres of screen real estate. I need an interface that nicely separates usable UI elements from the rest of the application window. That means 3D hints on a 2D screen, which allows my monkey-brain with five million years of evolved 3D vision the opportunity to run my “click the button” mental command as a background process.

Is there any sort of way to get the best of both worlds? to have the PC be able to go from power button to jellyfin server started and still have some measure of security?

Windows with auto login? Not really. That is, anyone with a mouse + keyboard locally can get in there.

You can set up jellyfin to run as a windows service and then it should auto start and run as a particular user without you having to log in. Have a look in the “advanced” section in the jellyfin docs.

you gotta indoctrinate them while they’re young & impressionable so that they will more easily accept your biases as reality;

Lol and social media companies are just such complete white knights too and would never engage in such tactics.

Train your LLM better.

You didn’t go to the library in the '80s and watch a DVD of a documentary to get the information you wanted.

So this is the concern I have with letting LLMs do all the heavy lifting. You’ve put in a nice summary of how we should be using LLMs and then here’s a glaring anachronism. So now that I’ve spotted that, should I take any credence in whatever else you’ve said?

I was thinking that I would have to switch to bsd.

Finally the year of Hurd on the desktop?

Not really, it’s just phrased differently to the usual signup pitch, they’re putting in a middle ground between full “premium” subscribers (whatever that is) and public access with tracking and ad metrics.

Companies need revenue to operate. They get that revenue from advertising data and selling ad slots, or subscriptions. Whether they actually cease all tracking and ad metrics when you subscribe is something I’d doubt though, and that could be a case for the legal system if they didn’t do what they claim.

Personally, this behaviour is the point where I would not consider the site to be valuable enough to bother with.

“ChatGPT, write a letter that says I am looking after this issue with BLOBs but do not be specific about anything.”

Mainly the issues are about providing ~600 kilowatts for 8 minutes to charge your typical size EV battery.

A row of 5 chargers of that size soaks up 3MW if they’re all in use, and that’s not something that can be quickly or easily shoehorned into a suburban electricity grid.

It’s about 500 houses worth of electricity usage, for comparison. For just 5 fast chargers.

Not to say it’s impossible, but infrastructure doesn’t come cheap, and so it’ll cost quite a bit to cram that 80 percent charge into your car’s battery.

You are flashing the chip directly so apart from inadvertent short circuits and such if it doesn’t work you can just keep trying until it does.

As for wire length it all depends on how fast they clock the SPI bus when flashing. You’ll probably be able to get away with 20cm or so without difficulty , I’ve driven SPI displays with that kind of wire length before.

Well this seems to go against all sorts of disaster recovery practices, so I’m torn between believing they are truly incompetent or they are just lying.

I want a music playing alarm app that’s permanently locked to Sonny and Cher’s , “I got you babe”.

What I’m asking is how tf did text messages and whatever in the walkie talkies ignite a spark strong enough to ignite the PETN?

Pager with firmware that activates an output on date/time X/Y and triggers an ignition signal. That signal is sent o an actual detonator in the device, which sets off the explosive.

Radio with DTMF receiver that activates an output when, for example, touchtone 4 is received over the air, or alternatively if the radio has GPS, another date/time activation via firmware.

Both of these things are relatively trivial for a nation-state to pull off.

So yes, in both cases it’s possible that faulty devices are still around. However, if all the rest of your group has had exploding pagers and radios, most people in the same group would have dropped their still-working pager or radio into a bucket of water by now. There’s probably a few, and they’re probably being carefully taken apart right now to see how it was done.

Afaik such an idea was nonsense previously.

It’s not nonsense, it just takes planning and resources. And now that people know it is possible, buying and using any sort of equipment for your group without having the nagging concern there might be a bomb in it is impossible. And that’s a pretty powerful limiter.

There’s a lot to be said for “http://yourISP.com/~username” being available 24/7 at no particular effort to you.

As another poster has mentioned, M-Discs are written using a Blu-ray writer and are good for a few hundred years, in theory.

Blu-Ray USB drive and M-Discs is about the best you can get at present. Keep the drive unplugged when not in use, it’ll probably last 10-20 years in storage.

Seeing as there hasn’t been much advance past Blu-ray, keep an eye out for something useful to replace it in the future, or at least get another drive when you notice them becoming scarce.

90% of users when they are presented with the UAC popup when they do something:

“Yes yes whateverrr” <click>

I’ve got photos in Flickr dating from 1999 onwards. Ten thousand or so of them, and a couple of the early ones are now corrupted.

But they are my “other backup” for Google photos so I don’t mind too much. I also have a USB Blu-ray drive at home that I use to periodically burn M-Discs that I hand out to a few relatives.

That’s about as good as I can conveniently do for backup, and it’s probably better than the single-point-of-failure box of negatives that my parents have in their cupboard.

when they’re powered down.

There’s no periodic cell refresh in flash memory like there is in DRAM. When USB sticks are plugged in, all you are doing is powering up the flash chip and interface ICs.

You’d have to read a block then write it back to actually refresh the stored charges in the cells.

I don’t think there’s anything commercially available that can do it.

However, as an experiment, you could:

• Get a group of photos from a burst shot
• Encode them as individual frames using a modern video codec using, eg VLC.
• See what kind of file size you get with the resulting video output.
• See what artifacts are introduced when you play with encoder settings.

You could probably/eventually script this kind of operation if you have software that can automatically identify and group images.